“The Justice Department has initiated no prosecutions concerning extreme interrogation methods,” Aftergood said. “But it is now prosecuting an individual who helped bring such events to public light. Is that what we want?”
Senior officials inside the U.S. intelligence community, however, have applauded the administration’s aggressive approach.
(ABC News/AP) - Former CIA officer John Kiriakou, who told reporters he participated in the interrogation of terrorist Abu Zubaydah, has been charged with leaking classified secrets about CIA operatives and other information to reporters.
Document
Read the criminal complaint.
CIA Director David H. Petraeus issued a statement to the agency’s workforce on Monday in which he said that he could not comment on the details of the case against Kiriakou but warned that “the illegal passage of secrets is an abuse of trust that may put lives in jeopardy.”
Others targeted in leaks-related cases include Bradley Manning, a former Army intelligence analyst accused of providing thousands of classified files to the WikiLeaks Web site, and Jeffrey Sterling, a former CIA analyst suspected of disclosing secrets about CIA operations against Iran.
Another case unraveled last year when the government’s most serious charges were dropped in favor of a plea agreement with Thomas Drake, a former executive at the National Security Agency accused of leaking information about failed computer systems and government waste.
Kiriakou made a media splash in 2007 when he appeared on ABC News describing the use of waterboarding against al-Qaeda suspect Abu Zubaida, also known as Zayn al-Abidin Muhammed Hussein.
After just one session of simulated drowning, Abu Zubaida cracked, Kiriakou claimed, saying “the threat information he provided disrupted . . . maybe dozens of attacks.”
But Kiriakou’s credibility was damaged when it emerged that Abu Zubaida had actually been waterboarded at least 83 times. Kiriakou subsequently acknowledged that he had no firsthand knowledge and that he had “relied on what I’d heard and read inside the agency at the time.”
Naming interrogators
The Justice Department alleges that after the ABC News interview Kiriakou continued to serve as a source for other stories, including a lengthy 2008 piece in the New York Times that revealed the name of the CIA’s interrogator of Mohammed.
Kiriakou “disclosed or confirmed” the identity of the interrogator to New York Times reporter Scott Shane as well as other journalists, according to the Justice Department filing. Shane declined to comment, as did a spokesman for the New York Times.
The Washington Post quoted Kiriaku several times between 2007 and 2009 but Monday’s charges make no reference to Post articles.
The Kiriakou investigation appears to have been triggered by a CIA referral to the Justice Department as well as a separate probe into how photographs of CIA operatives ended up in the possession of high-value detainees at Guantanamo Bay in 2009.
Investigators believe that defense attorneys obtained the photos after learning the identities of CIA operatives from a journalist who had been in contact with Kiriakou. The photographs, which included shots taken surreptitiously outside CIA employees’ homes, were shown to the detainees as part of an effort by defense attorneys to identify participants in CIA interrogations and potentially call them as witnesses in terrorism trials.
In an interview with FBI officials last week, Kiriakou denied disclosing the names of covert officers and expressed dismay that defense attorneys, let alone detainees, had learned CIA officers’ names, according to the Justice Department complaint.
The document also cites an e-mail that Kiriakou allegedly sent to the CIA interrogator after the New York Times story was published, denying that he had talked except to warn the reporter that naming the interrogator “might not be illegal” but “would certainly be immoral.”
Despite the denials, the Justice Department said, Kiriakou had talked to the reporter extensively and even provided the CIA interrogator’s phone number and personal e-mail address.
The Guantanamo defense teams, which included attorneys from the ACLU, have been cleared of any wrongdoing in obtaining or sharing the photos, according to the Justice Department complaint.
After leaving the CIA, Kiriakou worked as an investigator on the staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for a year before leaving in 2010.
Staff writers Julie Tate and Justin Jouvenal contributed to this report.
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